The present invention relates to disc brakes, and more particularly to a sliding arrangement for slidably mounting a caliper to a carrier in a disc brake.
Disc brakes are known in which when it is required to reduce the rotation of a rotatable disc a cylinder formed in a caliper is pressurized to cause a piston to project, urging an inboard pad into frictional contact with an inboard surface of the disc, and then the caliper moves, relative to a carrier, due to the reaction force resulting from the frictional contact of the inboard pad with the disc, urging an outboard pad into frictional contact with an outboard surface of the disc.
These brakes, therefore, employ a sliding arrangement for slidably mounting the caliper on the carrier.
According to a known sliding arrangement, as illustrated in FIG. 1, a carrier (1) is formed with two parallel bores (2) for slidably receiving slide pins (3) extending from a caliper (4), in which each pin is securely fixed to a supporting portion of the caliper with a mating bolt (5) engaging in a threaded blind bore (6) formed in the pin.
A disadvantage with this known sliding arrangement resides in that if both bolts should disengage from the mating slide pins, due to the vehicle vibrations, the caliper would disengage rendering the disc brake inoperative.
Another disadvantage resides in that, even if desired, the inner diameter of the threaded bore of the slide pin may not be designed large enough to permit the use of a bolt with a threaded portion of sufficient diameter because there is a limitation to increasing the outer diameter of the pin.